Small black line tattoo of an ornamented elephant with a teal clover above its back, on a person's ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate elephant with clover on an ankle

Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of an elephant facing left, outlined in black with decorative patterns filling its body and a teal four-leaf clover above its back. The linework is clean and the patterning is fine, with the clover as the only colour. The tattoo sits centrally against bare skin, with a blue quilted surface and pink fabric in the background.

Ankle Elephant Clover Flower Ornamental pattern Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Orla Pennick ran the galley of the Harrow Lass for twenty-two years and held that luck was like sourdough: it wanted feeding and it wanted leaving alone. So when the purser came down the ladder with a little brass elephant wrapped in oilcloth, she took it off him, turned it over in her floury hands and asked where the thing had been.

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Calcutta, the purser said, packed in a crate of tea. The man who sold it swore it had carried a princess to her wedding. Orla said every trinket in every bazaar had carried a princess somewhere. But the lacework on its flanks was fine as frost, dotted and looping, and someone had set a four-leaf clover in green enamel above its back, the way a girl might pin a ribbon to a hat.

She put it on the shelf above the flour bin and gave it a pinch of salt every Sunday, as her mother had done for the copper pans. The old hands said an elephant never forgets a kindness, and a cook never forgets a debt, and Orla was not sure which of them she was paying. The ship was not lucky that year, but she was never once without bread, and the men said that was a kind of luck too.

When the Harrow Lass went down off the Horn three winters later, the flour bin was the last thing to float clear of the wreck. The brass elephant was still on it, its clover green as a new leaf, its head turned towards the land the ship had been bound for. Orla's grandson keeps it on his windowsill now, facing the sea, and says the clover is the only thing that ever came aboard and was never once wrong.